Web services are one of the latest innovations available to users on the World Wide Web. This new web model allows any client user (a program for example, not necessarily a web browser) to initiate a transaction automatically.
By definition, web services comprise software components that can be described, published, discovered and invoked dynamically in a distributed computing environment, generally the World Wide Web.
Web services have already proved their usefulness in real-world applications. However, the current standard web service model is a synchronous one, based on a request/response architecture.
The following patents illustrate some solutions for performing operations associated with browser requests on the World Wide Web.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,317,786 to Yamane discloses a method and system for managing web servers, and more particularly, to a web service system operator for managing multiple web servers. The system can manage traffic by directing web page requests to available web servers and balancing the web page request service load among the multiple servers. The system can collect data on web page requests and web server responses to those web page requests and provide reporting of the data as well as automatic and manual analysis tools.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,247,056 to Chou discloses a system and method relating to server architectures in networked computer systems, and more specifically to a distributed architecture for enabling servicing to user requests across different machines.
However, supporting real-world enterprise business processes inherently involves asynchronous operations, as the processes are typically long in duration. Activities of each process need to be de-coupled from an initial request in order to optimize the use of system resources and to break the processing into a recoverable set of transactions.
Such asynchronous behavior is common for services that require complex processing that may take minutes or even days to complete when, for example, the web service implementation is dependent on batch processing or manual steps requiring human intervention. Therefore, there is a need for a web service system that avoids any lost data; the present invention offers such a solution.